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ABC Defends the Obama Flag-Pin Question

ABC is taking some flak for tracking down a woman named Nash McCabe after she told The New York Times she wouldn't vote for Obama because he doesn't wear a flag pin, and then including a video-clip question from McCabe on the same subject in Wednesday night's debate.

On Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has suggested that ABC was using McCabe to outsource a trivial question that would have been too embarrassing for Charles Gibson or George Stephanopoulos to bring up. He and others are similarly arguing that the network broke the trust of viewers who assume these questions rise organically from undecided voters.

ABC News spokesperson Jeffrey Schneider confirmed to VF Daily that the editors and producers of the debate found out about McCabe through the Times article, and he defended the decision to include her question."The question that [McCabe] had was reflective of the questions that a lot of voters we had spoken to had about electability and credibility," Schneider said. "What we found most interesting about her was, here's a woman who has endured incredible economic hardship…and has a husband who's on disability for the last 25 years, and all of these economic issues swirling around her, and the issue that she's interested in is this issue of the flag. The idea somehow that asking a question about the flag is not important—well, it clearly is important to voters out there, as witnessed by this woman who would certainly have every reason to ask all kinds of questions, you would imagine, about the candidates' stand on health care and taxes and everything else. Because those are clearly issues that are impacting her life, and yet the thing that she's concerned about and interested in is this feeling about the flag. It is an issue that in our research for the debate, voter after voter after voter raised and talked about."

So, while it might have been wise for ABC to pick one of the myriad other flag-pin voters out there instead of McCabe in order to avoid the appearance of drumming up an issue, the network is sticking to its view that the subject is a legitimate one to raise.

To complicate matters, McCabe said yesterday that the flag pin is not really the basis of her problems with Obama after all.